William Edward Leuchtenburg

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"This book is an attempt, by sampling, to say something about how the American people and the American land have interacted, how they have shaped one another; what patterns of life, with what chances of continuity, have arisen out of the confrontations between an unformed society and a virgin continent. Perhaps it is less a book about the American land than some ruminations about the making of Americans. Again the theme is Frost's:'The land was ours before we were the land's.' We are the unfinished product of a long becoming. In our ignorance and hunger and rapacity, in our dream of a better material life, we laid waste the continent and diminished ourselves before any substantial mumber of us began to feel, little and late, an affinity with it, a dependence on it, an obligation toward it as the indispensable source of everything we hope for."--from American Places.